Today's welfare system derives from the dissolution of the English poor laws. The old poor laws were the first laws established in a Western country that dealt with the management of poverty on a governmental scale. This chapter deals only with the philosophical aspect, and more precisely, with the epistemological aspect of the management of poverty and the resistances to it as we find them in Shakespeare. The relevance of the knowledge of poverty and wealth, or of the poor and the nature of money, during this period lies essentially in this being the first moment of a critical figuration of the poor and money. The poor was defined as such (the beggar, the vagabond) and as such reduced to the content of containment policies; money was perceived and understood in its ontological dimension: as the maker of human relations of power. The depiction of the poor as destitute beggars and of money as the substitute for human relations (or rather as cause of power relations) are fiercely criticized in Shakespeare. This is the sense of Lear's words to Tom O"Bedlam—"Thou art the thing itself"—as well as Parolles's statement: "Simply the thing I am shall make me live" (All's Well that Ends Well, 4.3.334–35)¹ I want to take you on the plane shaped for us by Shakespeare: the creative resistance to the definitions of a human being according to poverty and money. If we pay attention to the content of the laws enacted in 1597 we will understand how close they are to today's reality and legislations regulating poverty and immigration in Europe.